Mind your manners, diners, restaurants are turning the tables on grumpy reviewers

The Guardian

16-03-2025

My new duvet cover is upset with me. This is not, I stress, due to offensive activities in the bedroom. My sin is that two months after purchasing this admirably functional, mid-market item of bed linen, I have yet to leave a review on the company website.
Ever since my initial purchase – online, of course – I have been haunted by an increasingly plaintive sequence of requests, demands and, eventually, cajoling whimpers. Recently, these pleas moved firmly into the territory of emotional blackmail. As an 'independent, family business', my bed linen providers rely on positive reviews to keep a roof over their heads, I was told. I'm aware that the duvet cover itself isn't sentient but, with this level of pressure leveraged in its name, it's hard to catch sight of it in the laundry and not attribute to it a smidge of cotton-fibred resentment.
Incessant demands for consumer feedback are the newest plague on our inboxes. It's not just the duvet cover: Tripadvisor is still badgering me to review a restaurant I didn't actually attend, after looking it up last month; my new exercise mat came with a questionnaire; and when I bought a splurge item through a luxury fashion marketplace, I was invited separately to review the web portal, the individual brand, and the delivery company, each in turn. It's enough to drive one back to shopping in person, with cash – anything that doesn't require an email address.
So I was initially enthused to hear about Dorian, the Notting Hill restaurant that is tearing up the rulebook on customer feedback. Gone is the review-driven service and the abject apologies issued online to any grumpy sot who issues calumnies from behind a pseudonym. Any complaints left on Google or Tripadvisor will be roundly ignored; any customer who even mutters about leaving a review will be ejected on the spot. They certainly won't be emailing you to ask if there's room for improvement.
Instead, it is the customers who get reviewed. Buckle up, diners of London W11, and get ready for your manners to be marked out of five. As the old joke used to go: 'In Soviet Russia, television watches you.' Nowadays, in Notting Hill, potato rösti reviews you.
These reviews aren't published, so you won't be exposed to public shame, although you'll get a sense of where you rate, based on whether you're blocked from repeat bookings, or added to an elite WhatsApp group with access to last-minute reservations. But the in-house notes sound copious.
Dorian's owner Chris D'Sylva told the Mail last week that he keeps a logbook of diners' behaviour. 'It's a tiered system whereby we rank how much we like the customer and the value of the customer, or the destructiveness of the customer.' Behaviours likely to get you marked as 'destructive'? Turn up with a ring-light and demand help filming your dinner for Instagram. (D'Sylva has a healthy scorn for Insta influencers, largely due to the number of freebies they request.) The worst crime, however, is to show any hint of offering your own feedback. The only critique that matters here is the one issued to the customer.
The Dorian approach may seem aggressive to many, and no doubt has been publicised as a calculated strategy to cultivate a reputation for exclusiveness. The Mail's initial interview with D'Sylva included a blingy list of celebrities, or 'people of influence' to use his preferred phrase, who do merit a regular table. Yet, in 2025, there's surely something laudable about any business owner who refuses to be held hostage by any curmudgeon with a laptop and a Google account. Restaurant workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Tripadvisor stars!
We do all understand why businesses have been reduced to begging customers for online reviews. These now define how we spend our money. The result is a series of industries shouldering unjust levels of reputational vulnerability. No wonder criminals are monetising this weakness: last July, an acclaimed restaurant chain in the north-west revealed that it was being blackmailed by a gang who had begun to flood its online listings with fake one-star reviews, and threatened to continue if not paid off. Andrew Sheridan, the star chef targeted by the scammers, has joined a list of chefs backing Dorian's approach, although he doesn't ignore bad reviews by tricky customers: 'I respond to every unfair, bad online review, explaining why it's unreasonable.'
It's not only negative reviews that can be faked. In 2023 the consumer champion Which? revealed that 10% of surveyed Amazon customers had been offered bribes by retailers to leave a five-star review, often compromising a gift card of greater value than the original amount spent.
Whether in retail or hospitality, we find ourselves in a culture of uber-reviewing: a world in which we're all reviewing each other, all the time, and positive reviews are currency. The most obvious form of low-level irritation this provokes is that of the hassled customer: the part of me that resents when a retailer expects me to make payment by giving up my time, as well as my cash.
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More invidiously, however, it builds a world in which we're encouraged to complain after an encounter rather than adopt strategies to build trust with those who serve us. There is something avoidant about the post-dinner review. Too often, it seems to be an outlet for any minor dissatisfaction that a diner has never quite dared voice to a waiter.
The same moral cheapness surely creeps in when customers themselves are reviewed. The old adage tells us to trust a new date by how he treats the waiter, but what if he's only mustering basic courtesy because he wants to stay on the restaurant's list? (He'll need that gold rating if he's planning to bring a different date there next week.) Meanwhile, the services that already feature reviews of consumers have a nasty tendency to reward 'normal' social behaviour. One friend received a bad Airbnb review because he didn't choose to watch the football with his host.
It's not clear what socially normative behaviour at Dorian involves, but I suspect it involves racking up heavy wine charges – or being David Beckham. There's no radicalism in finding new ways to perpetuate a culture in which we're all fair game for judgment. I'll probably pass on trying to get myself a reservation. In preparation for this article, I had a peek at some of the Google reviews that D'Sylva is so keen to ignore. There's a healthy 3.9 star average, but the one-star stinker that sticks in my head spoke of being treated with 'utter disdain' by the staff. Fancy that.
Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture